Wikipedia's "Molly Maguires"

By Anne Flaherty

 

Problems arise from the very first sentence of Wikipedia’s entry on the so-called “Molly Maguires.” The online encyclopedia asserts: “The Molly Maguires was an Irish 19-century secret society active in Ireland, Liverpool, and parts of the eastern United States, best known for their activism among Irish-American and Irish immigrant coal miners in Pennsylvania.”

 

Contrary to Wikipedia’s assertion, the existence of the so-called “Molly Maguires” in Pennsylvania has never been proved. The controversy over the existence of this so-called “secret society” in Pennsylvania’s nineteenth-century coalfields has raged for a century and a half. 

 

Clouding the issue further, Wikipedia then tells of the so-called “Mollies” in Ireland, and of their counterparts in England. From Ireland, we hear of Whiteboys and Peep o’Day Boys and Ribbonmen; of “small-scale potato cultivation” and of “enclosure”; of “growing-season leases of farmland,” or “conacre”; of agrarian resistance, including the mutilation and killing of livestock; of “retributive justice”; of “Molly” leaders, presumably in the midst of the starvation of Ireland’s Great Famine, going to the trouble of dressing up as women to demand food from storekeepers. We’re then given a description of Liverpool’s “Molly Maguire club,” an association “known for its gangsterism rather than any genuine concern for the welfare of the Irish people.”

 

That’s quite a lead-in for this Pennsylvania conflict, which is a quintessentially American story.

 

But Wikipedia maintains its misleading stance, that the so-called “Mollies” did exist as an entity in Pennsylvania, throughout much of its entry. Perhaps its most misleading quote comes from Kevin Kenny’s Making Sense of the Molly Maguires: “‘the Molly Maguires themselves left virtually no evidence of their existence, let alone their aims or motivations.’”

 

In my two-decades-plus of research into this Pennsylvania conflict, I managed to unearth a mountain of such evidence. I found five alleged “Mollies” who had been elected as township school directors in the anthracite coal region, and four as officers of the Workingmen’s Benevolent Association (WBA), the regional mineworkers’ union. At least two of those elected as school directors had attained that position while continuing to work as miners. I found alleged “Mollies” serving as Democratic Party delegates, as township supervisors and high constables, as tax assessors, tax collectors, and even as overseer of the poor. Free men in a free republic; talented and filled with hope, these Irishmen were working their way out of the mines and into ownership of taverns, boarding houses, and small hotels, and positions of influence within their communities. Their AOH leadership helped them achieve numerous elective offices.

 

From the twenty-one executed men, I found numerous declarations of innocence: some given on the gallows, and a few published in New York newspapers in what were called “dying statements.” In private correspondence and in press interviews, some of the condemned men expressed a deep religiosity. 

 

I found the charter from 1871 for Pennsylvania’s Ancient Order of Hibernians (AOH), the benevolent order to which all of the Irish Catholic men charged as “Mollies” belonged. It based its ideology on the tenet “Love guides the whole design.” I found activity, within a month of the charter’s sanctioning by the Pennsylvania legislature, among Schuylkill County’s mineworkers that dovetailed with its ideology: a WBA resolution from the miners of Mahanoy City, home to alleged “Molly king” John Kehoe, offering “To Cut Coal for the Poor for Nothing”; i.e., to cut coal for the poor of the Eastern cities for free during an ongoing work stoppage. Within four years, Kehoe would be elected AOH delegate for Schuylkill County and high constable of Girardville.

 

I found evidence of involvement by alleged “Mollies” in the era’s Labor Reform movement, including a bill calling for cooperative ownership of the U.S. railway system, introduced in 1874 on the floor of U.S. Congress by John W. Killinger, Kehoe’s “Good old” friend.

 

As to the aims and motivations of those who prosecuted the AOH men, I found three successively failed Democratic candidates for Pennsylvania’s governorship from 1869 to 1875, the year the “Molly” arrests began: Asa Packer, Charles Buckalew, and Cyrus Pershing. The Labor Reform Party movement helped defeat all three men: Packer, one-time member of Franklin Gowen’s “Coal Combination”; Buckalew, former U.S. senator known as Gowen’s “right-hand man generally”; and Pershing, brought in by Gowen from Cambria County in 1872 and installed, in a dubious election, as president judge of the court of Schuylkill County.

 

All three failed gubernatorial candidates, along with Gowen, president of the Philadelphia and Reading Railroad, then played roles in the “Molly” trials: Gowen and Buckalew as prosecutors, Pershing as the judge whose court sent more Irishmen to the gallows than any other, and Packer as a backer of the Carbon County trials.

 

As to the aims and motivations of the Pinkertons, they were pecuniary. In May 1873, Allan Pinkerton faced bankruptcy. His generation of the “Molly Maguire” caseload saved his agency from ruin. Pinkerton’s undercover operative in the coal region, James McParlan, went on to a long and corrupt career as a result of his testimony in the “Molly” trials. McParlan’s failed prosecution (as “McParland”) of Western Federation of Miners’ officer “Big Bill” Haywood in the early 1900s drew this resolution from the citizens of Parsons, Kansas: “That we warn the courts and law officers of Idaho to be watchful of every move by James McParland, as we unhesitatingly declare that where there is a money consideration he will do anything no matter how low or evil, to accomplish his purpose.” Parson’s citizens added, “there is not to-day, in the United States outside prison walls, a more conscienceless and desperate criminal than McParland.”

 

Wikipedia’s “Molly Maguire” entry does make this admission: “This history remains part of local Pennsylvania lore and the actual facts are much debated among historians.” In its scope and its drama, this history deserves much more than relegation to “part of local Pennsylvania lore.” With its weaponization of ethnic hatred through the local, regional, and national press; its seizure of the courts by political and corporate interests, including use of some jurors who spoke little English; its widespread use of private police; its use of Pinkerton agents to draft and issue arrest warrants and advise Pennsylvania’s Board of Pardons; its denial of defendants’ right to testify on their own behalf; its use of potentially perjured testimony to condemn men to death; its conflation by the Catholic clergy of AOH membership with terrorism; and its prosecution of numerous Irish Catholic men holding progressive political views, this history remains a microcosm—and a severe warning—of the potential consequences of the seizure of state authority by monied interests. With the steadfast faith and compassionate advocacy of many of the Irish Catholic defendants, and the probability that many were wrongfully accused and wrongfully executed, this history remains a touchstone for those of Irish Catholic descent.

 

Immigrants often show a fierce love for their adoptive country. Two young AOH defendants, born in Schuylkill County of Irish parents, decorated the walls of their cells with American flags. On their applications for U.S. citizenship, AOH defendants who emigrated from Ireland renounced their allegiance to the British monarchy. They naively trusted the court system of the U.S. republic, including coal region courts and the Supreme Court of Pennsylvania, to shield them from the Pinkertons’ accusations. 

 

But in Pennsylvania’s anthracite coal region in the late 1870s, the “Molly Maguire” label proved lethal. In 1878, a few weeks before his execution, Kehoe told a reporter: “I’ve never had justice. The newspapers and the people are down on me, because they say I’m a Molly; and to say that in Schuylkill County of a man is about as good as signing his death warrant.”

 

James Ford Rhodes, in an account published in 1919, gave descriptions of Pennsylvania’s so-called “Mollies” as universally violent, drunken, and anti-capitalistic. But despite its extraordinarily negative ethnic bias, Rhodes’s text sometimes hit the mark. Rhodes described Pennsylvania’s AOH anthracite region leaders as “older heads holding high office and, in a variety of ways, displaying executive ability. They were quick to see what a weapon to their hand was universal suffrage, and, with the aptitude for politics which the Irish have shown in our country, they developed their order into a political power to be reckoned with. Numbering in Schuylkill county only 500 or 600 out of 5000 Irishmen [of voting age] in a total population of 116,000, the Molly Maguires controlled the common schools and the local government of the townships in the mining sections of the county.”

 

In one of the showcase trials, Gowen told the coal region jury: “I have seen this [AOH] organization wield a political power in the State which has controlled the election of a great Commonwealth.” When the trials began, AOH membership in the United States was approaching half a million members. McParlan’s conflation in trial testimony of AOH membership with supposed “Molly Maguire” terrorism helped send twenty-one Irish Catholic men to the gallows in five counties and imprison dozens more. That testimony also achieved the trials’ likely aim: the shattering of the AOH in Pennsylvania’s anthracite coal region, and its severe crippling throughout Pennsylvania and countrywide.

 

Wikipedia does justice to the plight of nineteenth-century anthracite miners, but gives little mention of the anti-Irish-Catholic prejudice rife throughout the United States during this time. Two New York newspapers, the Times and the Sun, proved especially virulent in their coverage of the so-called “Molly Maguires.” John Swinton served on the editorial boards of both papers. Some years after the trials ended, Swinton spoke with fellow pressmen in New York. He told them:

There is no such thing in America as an independent press, unless it is in the small towns. You know it and I know it. There is not one of you who dares to write your honest opinions, and if you did you know beforehand that it would never appear in print. . . . The business of the New York journalist is to destroy the truth, to lie outright, to pervert, to vilify, to fawn at the feet of Mammon, and to sell his race and his country for his daily bread. You know this and I know it, and what folly is this to be toasting an “Independent Press.” We are the tools and vassals of rich men behind the scenes. We are the jumping- jacks; they pull the strings and we dance. Our talents, our possibilities and our lives are all the property of other men. We are intellectual prostitutes.

Wikipedia’s “Molly Maguire” page names Philip Rosen as one of the historians who believed “that Irish immigrants brought a form of the Molly Maguires organization into America in the 19th century, and continued its activities as a clandestine society.” An article documenting a presentation given by Rosen in 2010 notes: “Members of the group would often dress up in women’s clothing and wear makeup while committing their violent acts.”

In the interest of the old expression of truth, justice, and the American way, Wikipedia might do well to revise its “Molly Maguire” entry to include more of the facts and less of the myth. As one of the trial witnesses in the coal region testified, his comprehension of the “Molly Maguire” lore was simple: These were tales that were made up to scare children.

 

Anne Flaherty is the  author of The Passion of John Kehoe and the Myth of the “Molly Maguires,” recipient of the Anthracite Heritage Foundation Book Award for 2025. Available on amazon.com.

 

This piece was updated on July 24, 2025.

Essay Collection

R

eaders are invited to browse the collection of essays posted here.

“Who Was John Kehoe?” documents finds from my travels to libraries and archives in five states. My family's long-held belief in John Kehoe's innocence and in the political nature of the “Molly Maguire” conflict guided this search.

“Jug-Handled Justice” describes railroad president Franklin Gowen’s usurpation of Pennsylvania's criminal justice system for the duration of the “Molly” trials. At this essay's conclusion John Elliott, the attorney who helped secure John Kehoe's 1979 posthumous pardon, gives a summation of Gowen’s actions. 

“The ‘Mollies’ Were Also School Directors” gives the background of five Hibernians prosecuted as “Mollies” who served in office as school directors. This piece also documents a resurgent tide of nativist feeling that manifested in the northeastern United States in the early 1870s.

“Pennsylvania’s ‘Molly Maguires’: The Surprising Western Caseload,” describes the “Molly” caseload in three western Pennsylvania counties. This effort from 1878 to 1882 involved dozens of defendants, but yielded few convictions and no executions.

“The ‘Molly Maguires’ and the National Labor Union” describes the relationship between alleged “Molly” Patrick Hester and Richard Trevellick, president during the early 1870s of the National Labor Union, a countrywide coalition of tradesmen.

“The ‘Molly Kings’ and Greenback Labor Reform” describes the role of Hibernians charged as “Mollies” in a progressive nineteenth-century financial reform effort. In particular, this essay discusses the relationship between Kehoe and U.S. Congressman John Killinger, a vocal proponent of Greenback Labor Reform efforts in the early 1870s.

The tab labeled “JOHN KEHOE,” located above, offers a bio for Schuylkill County’s AOH delegate.

Newspapers archived through the Library of Congress “Chronicling America” website helped inform this body of work.

A. Flaherty

This post was revised on September 1, 2017.

The Mahanoy City Miners and the Poor of the Cities

On March 11, 1871, officers from Pennsylvania’s Ancient Order of Hibernians (AOH), an Irish Catholic benevolent order, filed a revised charter with the state legislature. Some evidence suggests that AOH officers later charged as “Mollies” helped with this chartering. 

The new charter's introduction included this sentiment: “the Supreme Being has implanted in our natures tender sympathies and most humane feeling towards our fellow creatures in distress, and all the happiness that human nature is capable of enjoying must flow and terminate in the love of God and our fellow creatures.”

The same month that AOH officers filed the revised charter, miners in Mahanoy City, a heavily Irish town in the heart of the hard coal region, published a resolution. A report drafted by Pinkerton operative James McParlan, working undercover a few years later for railroad president Franklin Gowen, gives some clues to the miners’ motivation. In early 1875, McParlan gave Gowen a count of four hundred-fifty AOH men in Schuylkill County. Four hundred, he stated, were union men—members of the Workingmen’s Benevolent Association (WBA). Mahanoy City housed Irish miners who held combined AOH lodge and WBA union membership.

Of AOH officers later charged as “Mollies,” one had strong family ties to Mahanoy City in 1871. Former coal miner John Kehoe, the father of three at the time, kept a hotel there. Kehoe’s two grown brothers, both mine laborers, lived in town with their parents. Kehoe’s father Joseph, a mineworker, served over the years both as township supervisor for Mahanoy City and as town constable. John would hold the post of high constable in subsequent years in Girardville.

The Mahanoy City miners’ resolution issued from WBA District Five. It addressed the ongoing mineworkers’ strike and the resulting hardship in securing coal. It declared:

“That we, the miners and laborers of this district, hearing that the poor of the Cities of Philadelphia and New York are suffering for the want of coal, will give one or two days’ labor in the mines, free gratis, for the purpose of supplying coal for their pressing need, provided that the operators will give the use of their collieries, and the railroad companies will transport the same free.”

In March 1871, Pennsylvania’s newly revised AOH charter spoke to “humane feeling towards our fellow creatures in distress.” That same month, miners in Mahanoy City, a heavily Irish town and home to future AOH county delegate John Kehoe, offered to work “free gratis”—without pay—to supply the urban poor with coal during wage disputes.

The miners’ offer to supply coal to the poor depended on the matching largesse of the railroads. That winter Franklin Gowen, president of the region’s largest carrier, doubled, and then tripled, his freight rates—an act so outrageous, Governor John Geary called for a legislative investigation into the rate increase. Gowen’s action helped derail the miners’ offer to the poor. The New York Herald declared Gowen's intervention in the legislative investigation “one of the most barefaced frauds that has [ever] characterized the Pennsylvania Legislature.” Four years later, Gowen broke the miners’ union.

The language of the AOH charter, its filing the same month that the miners offered their resolution, and future AOH delegate Kehoe's ties to Mahanoy City suggest that the AOH charter and the miners' resolution flowed from the same spring. In late winter 1871, Christian ideology informed industrial action in Pennsylvania’s hard coal region.

Two and a half years after the AOH filed its revised charter, Gowen brought McParlan into the coalfields. Nine murders followed within a two-year period. Those murders drove Gowen’s early “Molly Maguire” prosecutions.

A few weeks before McParlan entered the region, newspapers in Boston circulated a letter allegedly written from Mahanoy City. It described the town as one of the scenes of the “dark deeds of the Mollies,” subject to “a perfect reign of terror by the gang."

One Mahanoy City priest challenged the image of his town as a hotbed of terrorism. “I have resided and officiated in this town for four years, and have yet to discover the existence of such a society, much less a single member of such an organization as the ‘Molly Maguires,’” Father Charles McFadden told the New York Herald in late 1874. “On the contrary, the people are peaceable, intelligent and law-abiding. … I had charge of souls in Philadelphia and elsewhere, and I must, in justice, say that the people of Mahanoy City are as pious and good citizens as ever I met with.”

This post was revised on September 1, 2017.

The "Molly Maguires" and the Yellow Press

By A. Flaherty

When reporters for James Gordon Bennett Jr.'s New York Herald stayed with the facts, they left behind some valuable clues into Pennsylvania's “Molly Maguire” events. Some of my best leads came from Herald reporters. One column described railroad president Franklin Gowen's intervention in legislative proceedings as “one the most barefaced frauds that has [ever] characterized the Pennsylvania Legislature.” A second described the contents of John Kehoe's cell on the morning of his execution, including documents that illuminate the Irishman's ideology.

But the Herald's Gilded Age publisher, Bennett, was evidently a law unto himself. His exploits included late-night nude horse-drawn carriage rides. A drunken episode at the family home of Bennett's fiance ended with him, by varying accounts, urinating either into the fireplace or into the grand piano. The stunt caused a duel and ended Bennett's engagement.

Sometimes Bennett's reporters strayed into fantasia. These scenarios ranged from fictional “Molly Maguire” outrages in Pennsylvania to a fictional outbreak of wild animals at Central Park Zoo.

On November 9, 1874, the Herald published an article headlined: “AWFUL CALAMITY. The Wild Animals Broken Loose From Central Park.” It told of ‘TERRIBLE SCENES OF MUTILIATION,” “A Shocking Sabbath Carnival of Death. SAVAGE BRUTES AT LARGE ... THE KILLED AND WOUNDED ... PROCLAMATION BY THE MAYOR.”

The Herald offered specifics: forty-nine people killed, but only twenty-seven identified. Twelve man-eating beasts still on the loose. It named victims, including an “unfortunate sewing girl,” along with the address of the precinct house that held her body. Escaped animals included “Lincoln, the Numidian lion,” a rhinoceros, a puma, a black wolf, and a Bengal tiger. Three regiments had been called out to fight the wild beasts. 

At the article's end, it declared itself fiction. Not everyone read to the end. Some, convinced the mayor had declared a state of emergency, locked their doors and stayed home. Others, brandishing pistols, rushed out to defend their neighborhoods.

The New York Times called Bennett’s fake news a “gross outrage.” Prominent men demanded action from the district attorney. Lawyers discussed whether those responsible for the article could be indicted for conspiracy to defraud.

On August 4, 1874, two months before it ran the zoo hoax, the Herald published a similar article from Scranton, Pennsylvania. Its headline ran: “THE COAL REGIONS. General Prevalence of Riot, Robbery and Murder. BODIES HORRIBLY MUTILATED. Ku Klux Notices Served on Obnoxious Citizens. Vigilance Committees Organized.”

Like the zoo hoax, the article from Scranton described many horrors. It gave victims' names and sites of murders. It named, in particular, Luzerne and Schuylkill counties--two locales where Ancient Order of Hibernian (AOH) lodges were particularly strong.

“All these outrageous proceedings,” the Herald said, “are attributed to the ‘Molly Maguires,’ a band of cutthroats who are said to ply their trade of robbery and murder in the mining country.” The Herald mentioned the Schuylkill towns of Mahanoy City and Shenandoah, noting: “Reports come in from the mountain towns that bodies are found frequently, showing the fearful brutality at the hands of fiends that roam unmolestedly the surrounding country.” A Herald editorial published in the same edition called for vigilantism, as law and order had supposedly failed.

AOH political activity preceded the Herald's report. The day before Bennett published the “Molly” hoax, a Democratic nominating convention had taken place in Pottsville, county seat for Schuylkill County. Christopher Donnelly, a future school director later charged as a “Molly,” was elected that month as AOH county treasurer. At the Pottsville convention, Donnelly delivered 39 votes to the nomination of James Reilly, a young Irish Catholic from Schuylkill County running for U.S. Congress. With Donnelly's action, Schuylkill's AOH entered the national political arena.

“The Democratic primaries this year were captured, swept from their moorings by a tidal wave of Irish national feeling and bias, created by the candidacy of Mr. Reilly,” a Shenandoah paper declared. “The young Irish American element of the Democratic party, who, for the past few years, has been coquetting with the Labor Reform movement ... adopted him as their protege ... Mr. Reilly's friends were in the majority and controlled the convention.”

As AOH influence grew, so did newspaper accounts tying the Irishmen to supposed “Molly” activity. “The criminal classes,” Bennett's Herald said the day after after Reilly's nomination, “have the power to control all elections in the coal country.” Schuylkill County housed the coal region's most influential AOH lodge. The Hibernians who elected Donnelly as their treasurer in 1874 also elected John Kehoe as county delegate. Kehoe, later hanged as a “Molly,” served at the time as high constable for Girardville. In 1872, he had placed his name in consideration for state assembly.

In early November, Reilly won the federal congressional seat. A few days later, on the same day the Herald published the zoo hoax, Bennett ran a second column on Pennsylvania's “Mollies.” This headline ran: “THE MOLLY MAGUIRES. The Lawlessness in Pennsylvania--Brigands Infesting City and Country--Cruel Murders and Robberies--Ku-Klux Outrages.”

By November 1874, undercover Pinkerton operative James McParlan had been in the coal region for a little over a year. This time, the Herald embedded two recent murders--actual murders--in its report of fictional “Molly” atrocities: those of John Reilly at Wilkes-Barre and George Major at Mahanoy City.

With coal region violence on the rise, AOH electoral gains, including the celebration of James Reilly's congressional seat, were lost in the upcoming press clamor against “Molly Maguire” terrorism. Within the next four years, the same town that hosted Reilly's nominating convention would witness seven more regional murders, all ascribed to the shadowy “Molly Maguires.” Pottsville would hold nine “Molly Maguire” hangings of AOH men. Testimony from Pinkerton operative McParlan, accused by defense counsel as a murderer, would help hang all of these Irish Catholic men.

The Herald published yet another column in November 1874. Originating from Mahanoy City, its headline read: “CRIME IN THE COAL FIELDS. Horrible deeds of the Molly Maguires. Women Outraged in the Streets.” A local priest wrote back in protest. But “Molly Maguire” columns sold a lot of newspapers. The torrent of print rushed on undisturbed.

The New York Times, the New York Sun, diocesan newspapers in Boston, Erie, Philadelphia, and New York, and newspapers in Philadelphia, Harrisburg, and the coal region all labeled influential Irish American politicians, long before their arrests as “Mollies,” as banded terrorists. Though the Irishmen's goals included keeping seven-year-old boys in classrooms and out of slate-picking rooms, the reporters’ “Molly” coverage helped sway coal region juries.

The year of Pottsville's mass executions, Bennett moved to Paris. In the 1890s, still in control of the Herald, the publisher moved his paper from lower Manhattan to Midtown. Stanford White designed the new building. It  became the heart of Herald Square. When asked why he secured only a thirty-year lease, Bennett replied: “‘Thirty years from now the Herald will be in Harlem, and I’ll be in hell!’”

A former version of this post appeared under the title "The Herald Seduces the Public." The post was last revised on September 5, 2017.